Warnings for Patients Taking Psych Drugs

Warnings for Patients Taking Psych Drugs (also for their families and prescribing practitioners)

By Gary G. Kohls, MD

Over the years, I have formally taught my patients (as well as many participants in my lectures and seminars) about the un-advertised dangers of psychiatric medications - especially the long-term brain alterations and drug-dependencies that drug companies don’t test for before the FDA grants them marketing approval.

Since my retirement from my holistic, non-drug, mental healthcare practice, I have continued to issue written warnings about the multitude of serious, sometimes even lethal, albeit unintended (and untested for), adverse consequences of taking psychiatric drugs, especially over the long-term.

My warnings have usually been directed at my fellow healthcare practitioners, nurses, social workers, clergypersons, journalists, legislators, various industry groups, and the public in general, but there seems to have been no audible response from most of them concerning the dangers to the very people that these professions are supposed to be caring for.

The information that I have relied on to treat my (subtly or overtly) drug-intoxicated patients came from many sources. Among those sources were 1) various peer-reviewed (albeit obscure) neuroscience journals, 2) whistle-blowing (and therefore often ostracized) psychiatrists, physicians, neuroscientists and medical journalists, and 3) my own extensive research into the basic neuroscience literature (which I had never had time to read as a busy family practitioner - barely having time to read the drug-industry-approved and subsidized mainstream medical journals).

In my Duty to Warn columns, I have often written about my concerns for the victims of brain-altering drugs, who, in my professional experience, had become dependent on (addicted to) any number of neurotoxic and psychotoxic drugs that Big Pharma had falsely assured me were not addictive.

Ignoring the essential reality about drug dependency and toxicity has caused many psychiatric patients (and their prescribing practitioners) to miss the fact that when the patients ran out of their meds or attempted to quit the drugs that were sickening them, they often became ill with entirely new symptoms that were the reasons for starting the drugs. (Quitting a psych drug can be as medically hazardous as starting one.)

The withdrawal symptoms that my patients experienced were always different from the symptoms that prompted the initial prescriptions, and they had been uniformly mis-diagnosed as a “recurrence” of the so-called “mental illness”, and therefore the offending drugs had usually been restarted, usually at higher doses, often with additional new drugs being added to counteract the new withdrawal symptoms.

I have also tried to alert the public, especially the media, about the epidemic of mass shootings that have been perpetrated by shooters whose brains, cognition and behaviors had been altered by psychiatric drugs. The mainstream media, not wanting to implicate the drug companies that advertise with them, prefer to demonize the folks that had been made “mentally ill” by the toxic culture rather than to the toxic drugs that can cause normal stressed-out, sleep-deprived and brain-malnourished folks, including the scores of male adolescent school shooters, to act like they are mentally ill.

Nevertheless, even medical journalists, especially those writing for major media outlets, have refused to even hint at (or been forbidden to write about by their editors or publishers) the strong connections between psychiatric drug intoxication and the epidemic of mass murder/suicide that continue to (intentionally?) confuse everybody. And so the shootings continue and the drug-marketers, drug-prescribers and other drug-profiteers continue risking the public health; and they continue getting off scot-free, never being charged as accomplices to the crimes. Just witness the pathetic failure of the defense attorneys for the Zoloft-intoxicated (150 mg per day!!) and Klonopin-intoxicated Batman Shooter from mounting a logical defense that could easily have convinced any intelligent jury to declare James Holmes of being “guilty” but temporarily insane because of his psychiatric drug-intoxication.

I attach below an important document from the Citizens Commission for Human Rights (www.cchrint.org) that contains vitally important information for readers who may be justifiably concerned about the potential consequences of the long-term use of psych drugs by their loved ones. It is highly likely that many psychiatrists, family practitioners, internists, pediatricians and nurse practitioners are not yet fully aware of the prescription drug dangers listed below and therefore will not have issued adequate warnings about the drugs.

Even though the incidence of the most dramatic dangers of psych drug-induced aberrant behaviors (including murder, suicide, psychotic behavior, criminality, aggression) are not necessarily frequent, the less serious adverse effects of drug-induced “mental illnesses” are common.

Those common adverse effects of psych drugs that can mimic mental illnesses are listed below and include increased depression, increased anxiety, mania, akathisia, suicidality, agitation, lack of empathy, fatigue and tiredness, insomnia (or somnolence), memory loss, diabetes, weight gain (or weight loss), loss of IQ points, etc.

If the readers of this warning recognize the validity of the statements below (or in the various Duty to Warn columns I have written in the past - please draw the attention of prescribing practitioners to the information. Perhaps he or she will become more aware of the serious dangers of the chronic use of brain-altering drugs. Perhaps such actions will prevent the next suicide attempt or the next mass shooting incident. (Warning: Patients who are already on such drugs are warned to not suddenly quit their drugs cold-turkey and to consult with their prescribing physicians to discuss the information above and below. There are compassionate practitioners who understand the neuroscience of addiction, drug withdrawal and brain nutrition that might be willing to help patients get through the inevitable withdrawal symptoms that commonly occur during what is ideally a slow tapering process.

Here is the article which is excerpted, with permission, from CCHR’s website. It details 22 regulatory warnings about drug dangers from various agencies around the world. We physicians were supposed to officially receive such warnings. (The documentation of each of the warnings can be found at the CCHR website or at the Duluth Reader website at (http://duluthreader.com/articles/categories/200_Duty_to_Warn)

ENDS

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